Roger Ballen

Russian creativity, a mesmerising record of innovation derived from absurdity and degradation, looms large in the mind of South African artists and writers. Perhaps it is the shared wretchedness of the lived circumstances in these two countries. In a 1967 Paris Review interview, Vladimir Nabokov, a self-styled ‘obscure novelist with an unpronounceable name’, decried his former homeland’s ‘unredeemable inequities’ and the ‘petty bourgeois smugness’ of Leninism – a critique that has a ring of truth in South Africa, present and past.

Boarder (2005)

J.M. Coetzee, recently shortlisted for a possible third Booker Prize, is perhaps the most explicit in his admiration of Russia’s great tradition, having written critical essays on Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; Coetzee’s 1994 novel, The Master of Petersburg (1994), even features Dostoevsky as its protagonist. (Russian critics have, in turn, praised his ‘ice-cold impassivity’ as a writer.) William Kentridge has also looked to Russia for inspiration, his work laden with references to the country’s revolutionary avant-garde, in particular to the filmmaker Dziga Vertov. For his forthcoming production of Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose, at the New York Metropolitan Opera, Kentridge has jumped back a century, immersing himself in the world of that proto-Modernist, Nikolai Gogol. (Of interest, Kentridge’s print portfolio, Six Russian Writers (undated), presented in an original oak box, goes on auction this October in Cape Town.)

Culmination (2007)

In the case of Johannesburg photographer Roger Ballen the connections are less explicit. Ballen, who has previously exhibited at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, claims as his key influences the post-war European and American photographers who congregated at the New York offices of the Magnum photo agency, where his mother worked (and the photographer was raised). Still, Ballen’s increasingly claustrophobic photographic tableaux, which fictionalize elements of his past photography, shifting the emphasis from fact to artefact, recall the comically tragic and absurd world of Gogol.

Fragments (2005)

In his 1981 book, Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov wrote of Gogol: ‘When, as in the immortal The Overcoat, he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.’ Ballen, whose work is increasingly concerned with visualizing psychological unease, is not the greatest artist South Africa has ever produced. (Who would consciously seek out such an awkward accolade in any case?) Ballen is, however, significant for unshackling South African photography from its slavish adherence to naturalism (of which the country’s documentary tradition is an extension); its dull love affair with the landscape; and, the ongoing genteel veneration of good taste.

Cut Loose (2005)

While Ballen’s increasingly fractured universe frequently lapses into formula in his new book, prompting one to speed through parts of Boarding House (2009), there are moments of perplexing clarity. One memorable photograph shows a young man in only his trainer pants; he is suspended by a tangle of twine, a large garden clipper lying nearby. The work is archly titled, Cut Loose (2005). Remembrance (2008) pokes fun at art’s obsession with death, Ballen’s response to the formulaic memento mori comprising a smiling skull held in the palm of a mannequin’s hand. Two cockroaches and a toy truck complete this Tim Burton-like composition.

Remembrance (2008)

For readers perplexed by the unyielding quality of his photos, further characterized by their despoiled patina and awkward poses, there is an introductory text by David Travis, retired chair of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. ‘The Boarding House is not entirely imaginary’, he informs. ‘The real site is a three-storey warehouse structure near Johannesburg. Remote and hidden among huge tailings from gold mines, it is a neighbourhood unto itself. Inside it is crowded with poor workers, transients, criminals hiding from the law, witchdoctors, pet animals and insects.’

Bus Station, St. Louis (1969)

This is useful, and also irrelevant: Ballen’s photographs could have been made anywhere, even in Russia, and this points to a key issue. As much as Ballen’s photographs tend to make imperious moralists of other South African photographers – ‘Where is the humanity?’ a famous rival is said to have grumbled – to singularly obsess over the how and where of his pictures tends to snuff their fictional trajectory. It is tantamount to demanding a brightly lit horror movie. Interestingly, the critical backlash against his 1996 book Platteland, which features deadpan portraits of impoverished white subjects, rehearses issues that have cropped up again in relation to the work of Cape Town photographer Pieter Hugo, whose portraits of travelling herbalists with their hyenas, honey collectors, people with albinism, Nollywood actors and the recently dead have generated strong disapproval amongst certain South African viewers.

Culprit (2007)

Although Boarding House is by no means Ballen’s best book to date, the arc of his recent photographs is worth noting, particularly when seen in the context of his earlier output, rare examples of early 1970’s photographs currently on show at Johannesburg’s Rooke Gallery. If nothing else, Ballen’s photographs offer a compelling view of how one man’s metropolitan angst – contrived or not – has been transformed into, as John Updike once wrote of Kafka, ‘giant fables’ and ‘comic representations of modern man’s cosmic unease’ – strategies especially pertinent to the South African condition circa now.